From “The Real Anthony Fauci,” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Early Treatment

His critics argue that Dr. Fauci’s “slow the spread, flatten the curve, wait for the jab” strategy—all in support of a long-term bet on unproven vaccines—represented a profound and unprecedented departure from accepted public health practice. But most troubling were Dr. Fauci’s policies of ignoring and outright suppressing the early treatment of infected patients who were often terrified. “The Best Practices for defeating an infectious disease epidemic,” says Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, “dictate that you quarantine and treat the sick, protect the most vulnerable, and aggressively develop repurposed therapeutic drugs, and use early treatment protocols to avoid hospitalizations.”

Risch is one of the leading global authorities in clinical treatment protocols. He is the editor of two high-gravitas journals and the author of over 350 peer-reviewed publications. Other researchers have cited those studies over 44,000 times.40 Risch points out a hard truth that should have informed our COVID control strategy: “Unless you are an island nation prepared to shut out the world, you can’t stop a global viral pandemic, but you can make it less deadly. Our objective should have been to devise treatments that would reduce hospitalization and death. We could have easily defanged COVID-19 so that it was less lethal than a seasonal flu. We could have done this very quickly. We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

Dr. Peter McCullough concurs: “Once a highly transmissible virus like COVID has a beachhead in a population, it is inevitable that it will spread to every individual who lacks immunity. You can slow the spread, but you cannot prevent it—any more than you can prevent the tide from rising.” McCullough was an internist and cardiologist on staff at the Baylor University Medical Center and the Baylor Heart and Vascular Hospital in Dallas, Texas. His 600 peer-reviewed articles in the National Library of Medicine make McCullough the most published physician in history in the field of kidney disease related to heart disease, a lethal sequela of COVID-19. Before COVID-19, he was editor of two major journals. His recent publications include over 40 on COVID-19, including two landmark studies on critical care of the disease. His two breakthrough papers on the early treatment of COVID-19 in The American Journal of Medicine41 and Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine42 in 2020 are, by far, the most downloaded documents on the subject. “I’ve had COVID-19 myself with pulmonary involvement,” he told me. “My wife has had it. On my wife’s side of the family, we’ve had a fatality . . . I believe I have as much or more medical authority to give my opinion as anybody in the world.”

McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.”

Pulmonary and critical care specialist Dr. Pierre Kory agrees with McCullough’s estimate. “The efficacy of some of these drugs as prophylaxis is almost miraculous, plus early intervention in the week after exposure stops viral replication and prevents development of cytokine storm and entrance into the pulmonary phase,” says Dr. Kory. “We could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks in the spring of 2020.”

Risch, McCullough, and Kory are among the large chorus of experts (including Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier) who argue that, by treating infected patients at home during the early stages of the illness, we could have averted cataclysmic lockdowns and found medicine resources for protecting vulnerable populations while encouraging the spread of the disease in age groups with extremely low-risk, in order to achieve permanent herd immunity. They point out that natural immunity, in all known cases, is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, being both more durable (it often lasts a lifetime) and broader spectrum—meaning it provides a shield against subsequent variants. “Vaccinating citizens with natural immunity should never have been our public health policy,” says Dr. Kory.